A Hard Word Spoken Gently

The following is a guest post written, by my lovely wife Sarah. In my estimation it is a hard word spoken gently. My hope is that you would see it the same way.

----------------

Though I don’t often speak about it, the weighty complexities of abortion keep me up at night.

There are three images that plague me. The first is the desperate mother. Maybe she is pregnant from rape or incest. Or maybe by her own carelessness or intention. Maybe she desires kids, but not until she finishes college, establishes a career, or gets the gender she wants. However she got pregnant, there may be heavy shame or unwanted responsibility if she has the baby. She is alone, tormented, confused, selfish, desperate. It feels impossible. Voices both inside and outside are deceptively assuring her that to do what’s easiest will be best. The walls are caving in. She doesn’t need a pro-lifer condemning her for considering ending her child’s life. She also doesn’t need a pro-choicer telling her that she has the right to make the choice to murder. She is not just a statistic to add to someone’s political agenda. She needs the arms of Jesus embracing her and the voice of Jesus kindly and firmly telling her the truth that life is sacred and that she is loved and cared for. She does not need a Christian to offer her pity, wish her well, and send her on her way; she needs them to invest in and help her. I’ve never heard a woman say that she regretted having her baby and wish she aborted after all. I have heard women, in the agonizing tears of heartbroken hindsight, say that they would give their own life if they could just undo the abortion they foolishly were allowed to get.

The second is the baby. That little everlasting being who, from the moment of conception (should nothing hinder his natural course), is created and ready to grow into a toddler, child, teenager, adult. That baby, though not sinless, is vulnerable, weak, oppressed, needy, voiceless, naked, poor, and made in the image of the God of heaven.

The final image is the abortionist. Let’s just say it, the murderer. John 7: 24 says, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” Somewhere along the way it became popular, motivated by fear of man and the schemes of the enemy no doubt, to push truth aside so as not to offend, not to judge. But the truth offends the one who has offended Truth. We are not to condemn, but we are to judge with right judgment. And someone who intentionally ends life is a murderer. So is someone who has ever harbored anger in his heart. So there I am the same as the abortionist. But Jesus says stop. He does not condemn, but forgives and commands to sin no more. For the one who refuses, who chooses death over life, who does not humble himself, who continues on in his wicked acts – for him there is a place reserved in hell. These doctors are lying to mothers and making a profit by killing. Their atrocious sins are against a holy God, and they need make no mistake: that sin will find its place in hell or nailed to the cross. The Apostle Paul was a ruthless murderer before the LORD intervened. In these clinics, in these hearts, may the LORD so similarly intervene to save the murdered and the murderer.

And isn’t this what the cross does? Isn’t this what may already be happening in our nation’s current events regarding abortion? The Gosnell case has opened floodgates. There are a lot of corrupt abortion doctors with disgusting and illegal practices. There are also abortion doctors who are functioning perfectly within the limitations of the law. But what Gosnell has caused us as a nation to ask is this: What’s the difference? What’s the difference between the 20-week-old fetus and the 30-week-old fetus? What’s the difference in terminating life inside the womb or outside the womb? I literally cannot keep typing when I think about the details recently exposed – the babies and the mothers who were hurt by Gosnell’s practice and others like it. But in the grief there is hope. Will God do here what He did for Joseph in Genesis 50: 20: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” (Genesis 50: 20, emphasis mine) A generation is silently disappearing at the hands of men who mean evil. Dr. Kermit Gosnell meant evil for selfish gain. But could God mean it for good, that many people should be kept alive? That many will wake up to the truth that there is no difference? That Roe v. Wade will be overturned? That the church will seek out these desperate mothers more effectively? That the mothers will be given more understanding and perspective? That countless scores of lives will be saved?

There is no question that life is a central theme of the Bible. The God of the Bible is the giver, sustainer, and redeemer of life. His heart is that none should perish. He saves and delivers and protects life. Abundant life. Eternal life. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. And so, while this is a complex and intimate issue, it is not a gray area. The hope and goal is life.

Heavenly Father and Righteous Judge,

Would you use these evils to save many lives?

I ask you to bring the unborn forth from the womb and allow them to serve you on this earth. Prepare godly families for them, and prepare good works for them. Use their testimonies for your kingdom purposes. I pray for those born and unborn to find their names written in the Lamb’s book of life.

I pray that your servants and ministers, both heavenly and earthly, would surround these confused mothers and offer them unconditional friendship and the hope of your truth. I pray for them to know Jesus and receive His abundant freedom and blessing. That they might turn their hearts toward you, either for the first time or as a return. Pour out your love and Holy Spirit on them, that they might receive the grace to joyfully trust and obey. Banish the selfishness that drives their decisions. Give them wisdom from on high as to whether they should raise their babies or give them to adoptive parents. I ask that you would allow many babies to stay with their birth mothers, whom you will equip, protect, provide for, guide, sanctify, bless, and perhaps even save through their brave and selfless decision.

I ask for you to grip the hearts of the abortionists. Grip them with the good news of Christ and usher them to repent. Be merciful and forgive. Let them not be deceived. Breathe into the places they’ve gone numb. Bring these doctors into your family, covering the bloodshed they’ve caused with the blood of the Lamb. Cause them to use their skill and qualifications to heal and save lives instead of end them. Destroy the idol of money. Powerfully intervene, and transform these abortionists into vessels of glory who instead spend their days on earth advocating for and preaching life – life for the unborn and life in Jesus Christ the Redeemer.

Give forgiveness and comfort to those who have already aborted. Deliver them from the bondage of the enemy’s guilt and shame. Lift their heads to see and walk with you. Be near to all the adoptive parents, teaching them to intercede without bitterness and equipping them for the beauty and labor of what you’ve put before them. Have your way in and through our political leaders. Lead them on level ground according to your ways. Cause them to abide in you and reflect you in their authority. And please be not silent, be not far from your church. Show her how to be holy, humble, bold, loving, united, kind, wise, compassionate, and gentle agents of truth and justice, who do your bidding in power. Make us ready – mother, baby, abortionist, governor, uninvolved Christian alike – to face you on that final fearsome day of glory.

I praise you, sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, for you are good and your love endures forever, your faithfulness through all generations. Thank you that you see and care for each life and every detail. Thank you that you are near and involved. Oh God, I petition you to remember your promises and your people. Bind up the enemy, shut up his lies, and break heart chains that he has locked within your people. Your light shines in the darkness. The victory is yours, and you are the God of salvation. Your plans will come to pass. Your ways and thoughts are higher than ours. You make all things new. May your holy and consuming fire burn up the wicked and refine the saints. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, perfectly and unhindered. I trust you and profess that you alone are God. My thoughts aren’t new, but they are fervent and heartfelt. I stand at the foot of the marvelous, glorious cross – where innocent murder resulted in the ultimate saving of many lives – and I lift these requests to your throne through the mighty and unfailing love of Jesus.

Beards and Babies

Back during my college days I lead a men’s group. Among the many things I commended to the four young men in my charge was that growing a beard and having babies were manly activities that were worthy of pursuit. Sadly they were freshmen so their beards were patchy and none of them had wives with which to procreate. In the years that have passed since our group disbanded only one has gotten married and had children while all four have had facial hair of some sort or another. This clearly illustrates a salient point: it is easier to grow a beard than get a baby.

Having had children of my own, I know that baby-getting is tough business. If done the biological way it involves nine months of constant discomfort that concludes in a day of extreme discomfort with months of sleepless nights for an encore. And that’s just for the father, mom has an even harder time. So while biological baby-making may be a hoot, biological baby-getting is no laughing matter.

But of course, there are other ways to get babies. No, not kidnapping, that’s illegal. Shame on you. Adoption. I’m talking about adoption. I thought that would be obvious. Even though adoption forgoes some of the less savory aspects of biological baby-getting it is nevertheless a daunting process, not least of all financially. It takes a serious chunk of change to make an adoption happen. This is where beards come in.

What? You don’t follow me? How is this not perfectly obvious? Let me break it down. I will grow my beard out for six months. You will either commit to give $10 a month to sponsor said beard (or give a one time donation). The money collected will go to help fund the adoption process of DJ and Courtney Hofmann as they try to bring home a little baby from South Korea.

Interested? Seriously, how could you not be? To buy into this awesome beard and baby bonanza go to http://www.abeardforababy.blogspot.com/ and sign up to either sponsor my beard, or if you are a bearded human maybe consider growing out your facial follicles and finding sponsors of your own. If you don’t want to donate online let me know and I can collect your donation (I swear by my beard all funds will make it to the Hofmanns).

Not convinced? What are you, some kind of robot?! Click on the link and check it out. Read their story, look at the beards. How could you not be inspired by this?

The Blessing of a Contrary Interlocutor

Interlocutor - n., a person who engages in conversation or questioning, an interrogater

I like being disagreed with. By that I don't mean I like it when people argue with me in an angry way, or call me names, or belittle my position on an issue. But for as long as I can remember I have enjoyed the back and forth of dialogue, and the mental exercise of vigorous debate.

While it seems that I am unusual in this trait, I by no means have found myself to be unique. There are many of us contrarians out there, and my wife will be the first to admit the trait is not always a positive one to have to deal with. But I will say the discipline of beneficent argument is one that is worth preserving and even going out of one's way to acquire and engage in. If my past posts have been read it shouldn't be difficult to see why. We all have a perspective, we de facto believe these perspectives to be correct, but we are naïve if we think that all of our beliefs are faultless. This is the value of a strong interlocutor, someone who can point out the blind-spots in our thinking, can make us re-examine what we have taken for granted.

But this takes work. Because when confronted with someone who disagrees with us on something we actually care about--politics, religion, sports, you name it--the first human tendency is to fight. We so frequently identify ourselves with our beliefs that we take personal offense at the fact that someone out there somewhere disagrees with us, and perhaps even worse, is trying to convince others of what we hold to be patently false. This identification is by no means wrong, in fact in some cases it is necessary to hold a belief with sincerity. Someone who says they believe that Jesus is God, or that Mohammed is the true prophet of Allah, or that Buddha found the way to reach Nirvana and yet does not on some level tie their identity to that belief is either insincere or so deeply compartmentalized as to be in danger of developing multiple personalities.

I do not believe the problem comes not with identifying ourselves with our beliefs, but with how we then go about interacting with others who are otherwise identified. I am not advocating here a sort of spineless "tolerance" that is dismissive of the importance of these things, rather I am asking us all to seriously consider whether or not our baseline ideological hostility is akin to racism; and perhaps just as deeply ingrained in our psyches and just as damaging to our ability to interact positively in a heterogeneous society.

What is needed is for us to develop an ability to thoughtfully, vigorously, and respectfully confront those who are within our sphere of influence, and likewise allow ourselves to be confronted. In some cases it is downright irresponsible to see someone behaving in a way that is believed to be destructive and to not intervene. Obviously not in every case--one need not go around pulling cigarettes out of the mouths of smokers--but in some instances to stand by silently is to be complicit in whatever destructive act is being perpetrated.

Love demands that we engage with others thoughtfully. On ideological issues the first line of action is to stand in the place of the interlocutor, and allow others to stand in that place against us. There is danger in this, a danger of having tempers flare, of letting an argument turn into a fight, but even then, if we step back and examine ourselves we may with careful consideration see the wounds we bear, the prejudices we carry, the flaws in our thinking that we disguise with emotion, and even then we may be better for the interaction. If we are instead constantly surrounded by sycophantic friends, who merely parrot our own opinions back at us, what have we gained except further justification in our natural tendency to denigrate those who think differently. The advent of politicized and polemical cable news channels should be seen as a great enemy to anyone who desires to see thoughtful and mature dialogue between those who disagree.

So this is an open invitation to those around me--more than an invitation, a request: stand against me where I am found in your eyes to be in error. I cannot promise I will always take it with the dignity and grace I would commend to others or myself. I will readily admit my natural love for a argument needs more refining than most, but as in so many other things, the key to growth is practice, and I would be the kind of man who can be confronted with thoughtful disagreement, allowing myself to be swayed by that which is truly worthy, and kindly and respectfully remaining defiant of what I am not convinced of as true. Here is the heart of humble integrity--not ideological narrowness, but conviction that is not afraid of being proven wrong. The grindstone and the file must be applied to our minds for them to be sharp.

Everything I Needed To Know About People I Learned In History 101

During my undergraduate study in philosophy I was required to take World History. Like so many other of my general education requirements I put it off until my senior year, which actually made for a very fun final semester full of freshman level courses punctuated with a senior seminar with my department adviser. The world history class I ended up taking was taught by Dr. Yamamoto, who I quickly grew to love. There are two things he taught that stuck with my about that course more than anything else, and have profoundly shaped the way I try to interact with other people, both as I view them historically. Funnily enough I think he discussed both of them in his opening lecture.

The first is only generally true, but nevertheless helpful. And that is that it is the duty of the student of history to assume that most of the people they study sincerely believed that their actions were justified and right. From Adolf Hitler to Mother Theresa to Woodrow Wilson, they all believed their actions were justified. Even during those times when people are behaving in ways that are manipulative, oppressive, or violent there is usually a justification for their actions--whether that is simply the belief in their own superiority over others or the perceived righteousness of the cause they are working for. In a sense Dr. Yamamoto was expounding a nuance that runs across the hermeneutic of suspicion. It is not there is no use for deconstructing the actions of others to reveal the intrinsic prejudices, hostilities, etc.; but rather that isn't the best way to start. If I want to understand why almost an entire nation could either passively accept or actively participate in the genocide of World War II I have to come to grips with their own self-understanding or why they believed the holocaust was justified.

The second principle Dr. Yamamoto taught that has shaped my thinking comes from a distinctly Christian perspective, and that is that there are no good guys and bad guys--there are only sinners in need of God's grace. And that doesn't change when someone is converted to faith. In one sense this completes the first principle--while people tend to think their behaviors are justified very rarely do people act in ways that are actually completely right or just. But that applies to the apparently saintly as well as the more obvious sinners. Pol Pot was no more in need of Christ's atoning blood than Mother Theresa of Calcutta. The only difference we can point to between the two on this front is that Mother Theresa seems to have got what she needed, whereas Pol Pot did not.

It is hopefully not to difficult to see how these two principles might be helpful in our interactions with those people we interact with in contemporary life and not just history. While the second principle may only appeal to those of a Christian persuasion who believe sin and grace are valid categories, the second seems like it could be accepted more broadly. My belief is that broader acceptance of the first principle within culture at large and the second principle within Western Christianity would greatly improve our ability to disagree in a way that is both humble and respectful. 

That the political climate in the United States is increasingly toxic and vitriolic is of the few political statements one can make that isn't currently controversial. While I think there are certainly some causes to be found within the last few decades of government policy and the increasing role of media, I think a great deal of it is also due to a broad failure on the part of common people to treat those who differ from them with authentic respect, the kind of respect that would seek to understand their own self-assessment of their position and not just paint them with the brush: "subversive" or "bigot" or "unpatriotic". 

Let me be clear, I think evil is real, and I think those within politics are capable of and sometimes do commit acts of heinous and reprehensible evil (this belief fits in with my second principle). But I also think that except in very rare occasions those people at the very least believe they are choosing the lesser of two evils but more often than not are choosing what is good and right. My first order of business, if I want to dialogue with someone I disagree with is to attempt to understand why and how this action is believed to be right. The more passionately I disagree the more crucial this becomes.

The benefit of this is three-fold. First I may come to see that they have a point worth conceding. In short I may realize that I'm wrong. The second is that I can actual meet them in conversation and speak to the heart of the issue, speak to the root of their belief instead of tearing down a straw-man of my own making. And the third is that this humanizes the one who otherwise is only my adversary. As a Christian who wants to actively engage with the world; be a participant in the events of our age; and think clearly and carefully about difficult and thorny issues I owe it to those I interact with to treat them like the people that they are. They think they are right (and they might even be right!) and even if they are wrong, they are in the same boat I am, desperately in need of forgiveness for all the places that I am wrong and still think I'm perfectly and completely justified.

Reboot

Once upon a time, I had a blog. I wrote in it fairly regularly. It was titled Hints and Guesses, after a line from T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets". This title was meant to convey a modicum of humility in order to temper the pride of the opinions expressed blogger who posted beneath it. Overall it must be said that I was not a very good blogger. When I wasn't expressing my opinions or sharing the minutia of my life in a vague and self-defeating way, I was throwing out snippets of poetry--mostly the sort of unedited free verse worthy of freshman level creative writing courses.

My habits as a blogger were so abysmal that in the past year as I have considered rebooting that blog I've always been daunted by task of overcoming it's sad history and the fact that all my previous posts would be there, my sophomoric whining, my self-important vagaries. It has been enough to make me wish to never draw any more attention to the thing on the off chance someone clicks the "older posts" link.

So to save myself such embarrassment, and to set a completely new tone I decided the only appropriate course of action would be to start a new blog. A more disciplined blog. Or rather a blog upon which the writer would be more disciplined, both in quantity as well as quality. A blog where I could discipline myself as a writer so that some day what is posted here may actually be worth reading. While I cannot guarantee that day will ever come, I am hoping in the coming year to at least post regularly, I'll start off shooting for weekly. And as far as quality is concerned I'm hoping the posts will be more than rambling free form poetry or convoluted references to the events of my life. The topics of these as yet to be written essays in the art of blogging? Well, I will probably stick to what I know think about most of the time: philosophy, theology, politics, literature, and poetry. And by poetry I don't mean my own attempts at it, but rather thoughts on other people's poetry, poetry that legitimately may be worth someone else reading.

A final note on the title, for those who may be interested (hi Mom!). In a further effort to grow in virtue, I am invoking two more prophets of humility in Søren Kierkegaard and the Apostle Paul. Fearful Hints and Trembling guesses interpolates the reference to Eliot's "Quartets" with a reference to the title of Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling", which is itself a reference to Philippians 2:12. The work by Kierkegaard is a book I read years ago and, though I have never revisited it (unlike Eliot's "Quartets" or Paul's letter to the Philippians), it has marked my thinking about what it means to live in authentic humility as a human being both as I relate to God and to the world.

So, here we are, the reboot is beginning. Comments will of course be welcome, though I will likely not respond with any frequency. Nevertheless I appreciate any investment in this project from others. Thanks for reading.